Pure praise for Santamaría and Cuba. Those seeking a history of Cuba should look elsewhere, since Randall provides a glimpse...
Prolific writer and translator Randall (About Little Charlie Lindbergh and Other Poems, 2014, etc.) touches on history only as background for her brief but admiring portrait of a woman involved in Cuba’s revolution from the very beginning.
Haydée Santamaría (1923-1980) should have been honored with statues and schools in her name, but because she committed suicide, unacceptable to the revolution, she is disappearing from Cuba’s history. Around 1952, she joined her brother, Abel, in Havana and immediately became part of the fight to overthrow Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. Fidel Castro’s small army initiated an attack on Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953, a military failure that sounded the opening salvo of the Cuban revolution. Santamaría brother and fiance were captured, tortured, and murdered. Plagued by lifelong depression, she worked for Castro and the revolution for the rest of her life. She went to Miami to buy arms from the Mafia, organized exile groups, and fearlessly traveled throughout Cuba without being caught. As of the beginning of 1959, the revolution was considered a success, with free health care, universal education, and nationalization of foreign companies. Unfortunately, Randall only mentions historical events in passing, assuming readers’ knowledge of Cuban history. In 1959, Santamaría founded la Casa de las Américas, which encouraged and protected the arts. In keeping with Cuba’s goal of becoming a significant global presence, her first act was to initiate an international literary prize. Casa was her great success, promoting art as the highest expression of revolutionary social change. She accepted all, ignoring race, class, or sexual preference. Supposedly avoiding hagiography, the author enshrines her subject, supplying adoring quotes from friends and family about her goodness, kindness, inclusiveness, devotion, and idealism.
Pure praise for Santamaría and Cuba. Those seeking a history of Cuba should look elsewhere, since Randall provides a glimpse of the Cuban point of view under which the only difficulties were caused by those nasty bullies in the United States.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5942-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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